Pon 1 - Put 1 (Shin)

Pon 2 - Put 2 (Double shin)

Todos Ponen - Put in everything

Toma 1 - Take 1

Toma 2 - Take 2

Toma Todo - Take everything (Gimel)

The parenthesis are for my Jewish friends familiar with Dreidel. My non-jewish friends can learn about Dreidel from Wikipedia.

Here are a few photos of us playing…

I still have many whale photos to post soon and some photos of friends and the upcoming whale festival this weekend. Stay tooned.

Lupita (left) is the daytime manager of the cyber cafe. Mis (right) helps me with fixing and maintaining the computers there. He will also be teaching computer classes at the cyber.

Friends chilling

Eddyth is the girl next to me. She runs the cyber in the mornings before Lupita comes in. Gordo, the owner of the cyber and Pax Terra's main local ally is on the right.

Stay tuned for more updates soon. I’m going whale watching tomorrow so I will have more photos and hopefully video from that. I’m also putting together lots of social media for Pax Terra that I will want to show off soon.

This small town is the primary settlement of Madgalena Bay. There are a few other tiny villages on the nearby islands coastline but San Carlos is the largest. Magdalena Bay has been relatively untouched by civilization and been the migratory home of the Gray Whales for a long time and one of Pax Terra’s goals is to keep it that way.

Harry, picture to the left, is the CEO of Pax Terra. It has been a pleasure and an adventure working with him so far. Business in Mexico can be very interesting to say the least.

Since arriving in Mexico I have also visited La Paz and Cabo San Lucas to meet some people I will be working with. I have been using Google Wave with the translation bot to work live collaboratively with the Mexican designer, video editor, and 3D artist, and other local Mexicans. Google translation tools have been incredibly helpful for basic communication as well as learning Spanish.

I was in La Paz on the same day officials busted a busted a Mexican Drug. That was a unexpected surprise.

The food has been mostly good. Ceviche is one of my favorite dishes. It is especially good on a hot day because it is served cold.

I am still getting settled in the place I will be living. The plumber has been working on installing the hot water heater and the pressurizer in the my new home here for last few days. Hopefully tomorrow it will be working. But the worst part has been the mosquitoes. It has been a constant battle to fight them out of my room.

I will mostly be working in the Magdalena Cyber Cafe in San Carlos. Here visitors can use the computers, take a tour to see the whale (las ballenas), and other eco-tourism activities like kayaking and sport fishing. This photo is a couple months old from before it opened. I’ll post a newer photo soon.

Over the next few weeks and months my goal is to clearly share the story of my adventures with Pax Terra in San Carlos. Stay tuned or subscribe for more updates.

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• Mexico Drug Lord Caught, Officials Say (nytimes.com)

While briefly at the museum I also saw the Journey to the Stars show at the Hayden Planetarium. Whoopy Goldberg was an interesting narrator. The show was short but packed with amazing visuals. It covered the basics about stars and their life cycle, so if you know most of that already and you are expecting to learn more about stars then you will be disappointed. However, if you are like most people who don’t know much about stars or if you are going to the show for the experience more than the lesson then you will enjoy yourself.

I had a great time for the short couple hours I was at the museum. I had other plans to get to. I have 1 more post to write about NYC (hopefull tomorrow) before my next adventure.

Has anyone else seen the Journey to the Stars show? what did you think?

The Somali K’naan opened for Lenny. His mix of Hip-hop, rap, and reggae was refreshing. Check him out if that is your kind of thing.

After the opening set the audience was waiting for an unusually long time after the set change. I heard a rumor that Lenny Kravitz requests that the air conditioning be turned off because “Lenny likes it hot.”

He put on a good show but the audience seriously detracted from it so that was disappointing. It wasn’t until the last few songs that people finally got moving to the music. At least I had a great time. Anyway, here are some photos I snapped at the show.

On Sunday I attended the National Equality March on Washington. To the left is a photo I took at The Capital building. I arrived at just before the marchers. They left from the White House and marched through the streets to the capital.

People were holding many funny and poignant signs as they arrived on the capital lawn from the end of the march. I couldn’t get any clearly readable photos but I’ll look around the web and see if I can find photos others took at the rally to post here. There were many speakers at the rally as well.

The march was enormous. It took about an hour for everyone to get into place on the lawn. Even then there wasn’t enough room for people. The police were estimating the crowd size was between 150,000-200,000. Michael Crawford says The Advocate is reporting the official estimate is 150,000. Last night Jon Stewart had hilarious coverage of the march as expected but reported only 75,000 in attendance. Also on the Daily Show, John Oliver interviewing people at rally about the radical gay agenda.

The night before the march, Obama gave an excellent speech to the Human Right’s Campaign about LGBT issues. Here are the YouTube videos.

Last night I saw The Fellowship of the Ring at Radio City Music Hall with a live orchestra and chorus. I had never been to a movie with live music like this before. Apparently they are doing them with Lord of the Rings and with Star Wars in a few select venues around the country.

I love the movie and I am very familiar with the score which made the experience more enjoyable. In 2004, my high school wind ensemble played a short arrangement of the Fellowship score that we performed alongside a video compilation I edited and arranged to match our simplified score. We played the video on a projector behind us while we performed the music as fund raiser for the music program. This event last night felt like a large professional version of the experience I helped create a few years ago. As you can imagine I identified with the concert on a personal level. Here is a review of my experience.

Overall, I was very entertained by the show. I found that it kept my attention more than a typical classical concert. The music was great but they also put the subtitles on the video so in the rare instances when the music covered up the dialog you could still easily follow the story. It was fun being able to glance down when you hear specific instruments or parts and spot the musician. All of the performers were wearing black except the solo vocalist who sang the Enya song and Elf themes who stood out in her light red dress. She sounded remarkably close to the original film score.

The audience was like the ones that go to the midnight release shows but applauded even more often. You could tell everyone was enjoying themselves but I wish people would have kept their applauses for the end of songs to praise the musicians rather than applauding for main character appearances and scene transitions.

I also have a couple minor criticisms of the way they presented the show. There was a smaller full screen on either side of the main movie screen they used to show slide advertisements before the show. They should have been hooked up to cameras in the hall and shooting video of the orchestra and chorus to provide a better look at the performers for the more distant seats. Also, the program had no information about the event at all. There should have been at least a little blurb about the conductor, orchestra, and chorus. I know the chorus usually plays in Carnige Hall because my aunt is a soprano in the group. I assume the orchestra was also a local New York City ensemble but I heard the conductor was brought in from Europe.

I would recommend live music film experiences like this to anyone who enjoys both live orchestral music and is a fan of the movie. They are performing the sequel, The Two Towers, at Radio City again in 1 year and I hear there is a show in the LA area soon as well. Maybe you can make it next time.

Tonight I leave for New York. I’m taking the red-eye out on JetBlue and getting into NYC at 6:30am. I’m excited for many of my planned activities but more on that once I make it through this crazy night flight.